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The Possibility Of An Island
by Michel Houellebecq
The loved and despised French author's fourth novel--a critique of present-day culture--is partially based on the real-life cloning-obsessed cult the Raelians.
Knopf, 352 pages
05/23/2006
$24.95
ISBN: 0307263495
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
Science Fiction & Fantasy
NOTES:
Known in Europe as "La possibilite d'une ile." Translated from the French by Gavin Bowd.
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Houston Chronicle Steven E. Alford
Readers will do well to ignore the author and read his provocative, often funny, intellectually engaging novel.
Village Voice David Ng
Reviewers intent on taking him down (as John Updike attempted in a recent New Yorker) come off as prudish and puny. Houellebecq's infinite void swallows everything and spits nothing back. It's enough to make Daniel25 wish for the certainty of death. "I was, I was no longer," he intones, longing for oblivion. Until then, there's always money, pussy, and if we're lucky, more novels by Michel Houellebecq.
Wall Street Journal Brian A. Brown
The Possibility of an Island, like other books by Mr. Houellebecq, is a sharp check on our hubris, our complacent assumption that things are getting better and better. It is always worth asking whether they really are.
Washington Post Merle Rubin
It's a skillful amalgam of prophecy, satire and science fiction, covering some of the same ground as Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" but with much more finesse and conviction.
Daily Telegraph Tibor Fischer
If you liked "Atomised" and "Platform," you'll love The Possibility of an Island. Houellebecq is perhaps the most talented of current French writers, and might be termed the Lord of the New Despair, but he has yet to write his masterpiece.
The New York Times Book Review Stephen Metcalf
By turns bewitching and tiresome...In over-extrapolating from his hero, Houellebecq too often becomes a proselytizer on behalf of fornication, as boring as those who would thump their Bible against it.
Publishers Weekly
Houellebecq has never written better, yet this novel seems stuck in the groove--clunky mini-essays, gonzo porn digressions--first etched by his earlier novels. [27 March 2006, p.61]
Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Riemer
Some readers may be growing tired of his studied outrageousness. And the formula is, perhaps, turning too predictable. Yet the intensity of his misanthropy and pessimism is as striking as ever. As is his despairing, basically traditional moral stance.
The Independent Matt Thorne
It's unsurprising that a misanthropic talent with a love of science fiction would want to realise his vision of the end of the world, but Houellebecq is undoubtedly at his best when he uses his forensic skills to dissect our present age.
The New Republic James Wood
It is the fiction that is itself comparatively weak, and comparatively uninteresting.
Boston Globe Nathaniel Bellows
A book of large ideas that attempts to explore, but fails to cohere, the unwieldy ideas of love, isolation, sexual necessity, personal expression, and technology.
The Observer Tim Adams
Tou are left with a repetitive, clever shell of a world, a calculated atmosphere of pornography, gratuitous and starkly lit, which, though it is perhaps what the author is striving for, never feels quite enough.
The Spectator Anita Brookner
Long and intractable. [22 Oct 2005, p.54]
PopMatters John Schacht
Like Daniel1, Houllebecq is a wounded animal lashing out in fear at the unfathomable mysteries of existence. Admiration for Houllebecq's considerable skills as a writer is tempered by pity, because joy seems, in the end, simply beyond him.
Daily Telegraph
This is far from Houellebecq’s best work. He belongs to the tradition of Rabelais and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, but lacks their human and stylistic richness. There can be a laziness about his work, a tone of indolent provocation, and you sense it here.
The New Yorker John Updike
It is to Houellebecq’s discredit, or at least to his novel’s disadvantage, that his thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity in its traditional occupations and sentiments prevents him from creating characters whose conflicts and aspirations the reader can care about.
London Review Of Books Theo Tait
Disastrously ricocheting between scepticism and credulity, cynicism and sentimentality, The Possibility of an Island offers mostly pointless hate and filth.
San Francisco Chronicle Michael Roth
[Houellebecq]'s flat tale to illustrate the idea of the end of history is merely neophilosophy, pseudothought. Without originality, without poetry and with an odor of sanctimonious self-seriousness, he has given us a wanna-be novel of ideas.
The Nation Christine Smallwood
The Daniel chapters are long-winded but tolerable; the Daniel24 and -25 chapters are unbearable pseudo-philosophical meditations on the meaning(lessness) of human life...Island, where science-fiction fantasy retreats into a political vacuum, is unmoored from the ideas that grounded his previous fictions, and fails--as a novel and as theory.
Booklist Allison Block
Frequently labeled by critics as a malcontent and misogynist, Houellebecq seems to revere canines, with their capacity for devotion and unconditional love. It's a strange bit of sentimentality from a man who seems, by all accounts, heartless. [1 May 2006, p.71]
Kirkus Reviews
A verbose novel of crushing ideas, ostentatious carnality and deep misanthropy that fail to connect. [15 Apr 2006, p.371]
New York Observer Regina Marler
His sour fictional enterprise is, like Daniel’s sagging testicles, showing the effects of age and overexertion.
[29 May 2006]
The Independent Tim Martin
The dusting of hard science that was little more than plot thickener to the previous novel becomes a dense film in this one. Elsewhere, he simply drags out the tropes on which he has traded for years: male desolation, salvatory blowjobs, general death of love, etc.
 The average user rating for this book is 8.7 (out of 10) based on 14 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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